Anarchism in Glasgow
Part 2 Charlie Baird Snr, Mollie Baird, John Taylor Caldwell,
Babs Raeside, Jimmy Raeside, 14/8/87
In August 1987 the Raesides, who had been living in Australia for
many years, returned to Glasgow for a visit. This provided a rare
opportunity to bring together some surviving members of anarchist
groups in Glasgow during the 1940s for a public discussion on the
history of that movement and the lesson which can be learned.
JTC: What did you think of Eddie Shaw as a speaker?
CB: Well, I didn't agree with his type of propaganda. He could
draw a crowd; he could hold a meeting, but you always got the
feeling that Eddie was speaking for Eddie and his distinctive
propaganda was different from Jimmy's. Jimmy was a very capable
speaker The difference was that Shaw's type of propaganda and
perspective was that Shaw pandered to an audience, he
commiserated to them in their misery and all the rest of it. You
could see blokes bring their wives up to hear him. Raeside sent
them away thinking - this was the difference. I didn't agree with
Shaw - I told him that at the time.
MB: The apprentices strike: now, we had about a dozen
apprentices at the time...
Q: When was this, Mollie, '44?
MB: '45 I would say.
JR: They started coming in before that - Roy Johnston and that -
that was before...
MB: That's right. They were holding meetings down at Clydeside,
like at...
JR: John Browns Yarrows, right along the Clydeside...
MB: ...and these young apprentices were getting interested. Then
the apprentices strike - and we had about a dozen young
apprentices coming in - Bobby Lynn was one of them, and a big
fellow - Willie Johnston - not that he was much of an anarchist,
he stood for Lord Provost of Clydebank before he finished up. The
boys were really keen, Spain had just finished and they were
still interested in Spain. Johnston had a conference that Sunday
and, just to give you an insight into Shaw: if you could have got
Chic Murray, the comedian, he would have been just about as good.
Charlie got this boy Johnston to go up on the platform, he was
doing quite well, he said: well, I'm not a speaker, but Charlie
said: We'll help you if you get into difficulties. The boy had a
marvellous meeting and the other apprentices were asking
questions, and he even did quite well in answering these
questions. The boy was holding their attention, but Eddie said:
You know, they're only holding on waiting for me. The man's head
was that size!
JTC: He was a forerunner of Billy Connolly.
MB: Eddie was in America for a few years - he was a
fender-bender. He wouldn't work for a boss, he would only do for
the different garages which would employ him. His wife used to
say, come on in Eddie when he was standing watching the suckers
(and he said "suckers" from the platform!) putting in the hours.
Now you know you've got to do something to get money but...
CB: That was the debit side of Eddie Shaw, but there's another
side of him. He was an asset of the movement, I recognised that.
I didn't agree completely with the type of propaganda - he was
comical, funny, entertaining, a carefree type of person. There
was a place in the movement for him, he was an asset. Mollie gave
you another side of him, but then we could live with that, it
wasn't doing the movement any harm. Except that he was a
personality with most of the other members, and this is one of
the lessons to learn from anarchist groups who broke up and
disappeared. We have to ask ourselves the question: why? what
happened? If we don't learn from them, it's worse. I'd suggest to
young anarchists today to consider these aspects of the problem.
I'd say the responsibility to prevent these splits is to be
vigilant about personalities and see that no-one constructs power
from the group; once that happens that's the beginning of the end
for the group. We may have mentioned certain comrades, but you
have to understand I still liked Shaw, in spite of all the thing
we've said about him. Leech I couldn't like - some people excused
him by saying he was naive - he was naive but he was dangerous.
He contributed most to the split within the group by his
activities.
During the war
Q: What may amaze many people sitting here is that this was all
happening in the middle of the Second World War, which was meant
to be mass united patriotism united everyone against the common
foe. Here we're getting a picture that in Glasgow it was a bit
different. Maybe we haven't talked about the industrial front, as
well, the opposition to the CP collaborating with the bosses.
MB: Yes, that certainly did happen.
JR: I understand that at that time when the CP in New York were
discussing it, one bloke went to the toilet and when he came back
the position of the group had changed!
JTC: One I can tell you intimately about was that Harry McShane
was due to go down to Brunswick St to speak on a Sunday morning.
He got his orders to change completely and call the war a
people's war, a patriotic war, a war against fascism, and he
didn't know where he was - he had to read it. He only spoke about
20 minutes, so that he could report back to the party that he had
held the meeting as directed. They did such a somersault. But
then he (CB) was going into more theoretical stuff... The
difficulty is that in the anarchist movement there's always lack
of definition: get 3 anarchists together and they'll give you 30
definitions of what anarchism is, because by its very nature it's
indefinable because it's without authority. Therefore you have
different kinds of anarchism. Talking of personalities and
clashes within the movement: Bakunin and Marx destroyed the 1st
International between them and although Proudhon was dead, his
influence was so great that Marx moved the centre of the
International movement from France to Germany, in which it became
connected with Kautsky and took on Social Democratic character,
which was later reflected in the ILP and the Labour Party...
The movement has been riddled with dissention the whole time,
with personalities - we've just got to contend against that, try
to clear your way through that and see what you can find solid.
Now there's many different schools of anarchism. Guy used to say
there were 7, but two which seem to come to the fore now and
again were anarchism and egotism, that is Max Stirner's "Ego and
His Own" in which an anarchist was an individual and a
multiplicity of anarchists were a concourse of individuals, and
these individuals had to find some common denominator in running
society, but these individuals were all persons in their own
right. Now, the Kropotkinite anarchists were anarchist-communists
- in simplistic terms, an ego is not a person bounded by his skin
from head to toe, an ego is a ramification of all his
associations... and his associations go back beyond his present
time, beyond your 20 years away back into the past, so that we
inherit much of our ego, much of our responsibility. Therefore a
centre of our egoism should be a concept of the community. He
tried to prove this was a predominating feature in biology from
the beginning of time and one of the causes of evolution - not
"nature red in tooth and claw" as Darwin had said and the
capitalists were now using... That's two different clashes you
had. You can, when you join a movement, have at the back of your
head "I am but an integral part of a community. What I do has to
be related to the advantage of a community. Mixed with other
people I can develop what's inside myself, my own personality,
that's my anarchy"... You do not accept standardised authority
for its own sake...
That's two different types of anarchism. Bakunin had a slightly
different one...
Egoism and Mutual Aid
Q: Can we explore the situation in the 1940s with these three
different movements: Guy Aldred's USM, the Anarchist Group,
Willie MacDougall's group. Did people get on? Was there mutual
aid in relation to the anti-war movement, etc?
JTC: No, there wasn't mutual aid.
JR: There was indeed, there was a great deal of mutual aid.
JTC: Well, we both look from different aspects.
CB: As a matter of fact, in the Glasgow group, it was split too.
This didn't contribute to the ultimate split, but the group was
split over the question of mutual aid and the ego. Eddie Shaw was
an egoist; he was a Max Stirner man, and it was a bible with him,
he carried it in his pocket every day and crusaded with it. On
the other hand there was Jimmy Dick who was a Kropotkin man It
became so tedious that we had a debate on it. So Shaw and Jimmy
Dick put their cases and we were still split. In fact from my own
point of view and others too, mutual aid and the ego weren't
antagonistic at all, they were complementary. First of all take
the ego: a herd of buffalo - why do they herd together? For the
maximum of safety - that's mutual aid. It comes from the self,
the ego, the individual. So there's no conflict between the ego
and mutual aid in that respect, and that was pointed out to Jimmy
Dick and Eddie Shaw and we heard no more about it.
JTC: George Woodcock in his study of anarchism refers to the
Glasgow anarchists as a small group who are still Stirnerites,
believing in Egoism. Now, I know that Eddie Shaw believed that,
he once had quite a long talk with me, but he was a crude
Stirnerite. He said to me "I believe in Number One - Get what you
can out of it" And he said of fixing his cars: You see the one
that's going to give you the most, and hang on to him. That was
his concept.
CB: He didn't relate it to the group. Conscious Stirnerites,
through self-interest, would identify their safety in numbers and
that we can achieve more in numbers than as an individual...
JR: One point regarding that, this attitude towards the ego. I
believe (with Bertrand Russell) that the most we can hope from
the individual in our society is intelligent self-interest, and
if he is intelligent he'll see that cooperation is going to be a
great deal better than confrontation.
JTC: That's asking too much. The intelligent self-interest of
most people means getting themselves and their family on...
JR: Well, it's hardly very intelligent then, is it?
JTC: Mrs Thatcher in one of her last speeches (you must listen
to Mrs Thatcher, she's a genius of mediocrity) said that a person
should do the best for themselves and get the best they could out
of society and pass it on to their son. She said that is the
deepest morality. That's not the deepest morality.
JR: I believe literally in what you just said she said. Because
I don't think she meant it the way you meant it. That you should
screw everyone else - that's hardly intelligent self-interest. I
think the norm of intelligence doesn't vary very much and we're
all products of our environment, which includes even our
parentage and our upbringing.
JTC: No, I'd say the fact of economism, trade unionism gathers
strength in countries before anarchism does proves that people re
out for what they can get. That has been the bugbear of
socialism.
JR: The people who make a living from trade-unionism are very
much to the fore in persuading people to accept that outlook.
JTC: Very few strikes are entirely idealistic. They're about 3p
more because the labourers got a rise: they're differentials.
Strikes
Q: What about the strikes in 1944: the apprentices, the strikes
in Lanarkshire, etc?
MB: What was the apprentices strike about in 1944?
CB: Wages.
JTC: They were still getting 8/- a week and with the war there
was inflation of wages, but the boys weren't getting it.
Q: And fighting for their rights?
MB: Plus the fact that boys who were not fully-fledged
journeymen were doing men's work...
JTC: That's true. They were making the fourth year apprentices
do men's work.
MB: And sending an apprentice along with an apprentice.
Q: What about the printing press question? You've talked about
the problems with Freedom Press in London. Guy Aldred had his own
printing press, but it was the one time there was a really
strong anarchist group in Glasgow - did you never think of doing
your own paper?
MB: We did.
CB: After the split we did produce a paper, "Direct Action" but
it was mostly industrial.
JTC: Willie MacDougall did a paper? Who produced "Advance" and
"Solidarity"?
MB: Willie MacDougall did his own "Solidarity" but "Direct
Action" was another wee printer, an alternative to...
CB: While that issue was going on about more industrial news in
"War Commentary", I suggested to the Glasgow Group, that we had
the money and could produce an organ of our own, quite a
substantial thing too, but, of course, Shaw and Leech sabotaged
that too. But with the benefit of hindsight, as Mollie said
earlier on, the majority weren't anarchists, just camp-followers
suffering from a leadership complex.
MB: We had one good wee Irish guy, wee Reilly, he had a huge
meeting one Sunday in Princes St, and was doing quite well and
got very excited and said "If you want a leader I'll lead you!"
The majority did require a leader.
JTC: What was the name of the old fleapit cinema you (JR) used
to fill every Sunday in Partick?
JR: No, the only one was the Cosmo in Rose St.
MB: Oh, the Grove.
Q: Did the women play a distinctive role in those days?
MB: No, women play a part, they're merely a part. I'm against
all this gay movements and black movements and womens movements.
If you're an anarchist, you're an anarchist and it doesn't matter
what section of them you are. If you start splitting them into
groups you're going to have less.
JR: Babs was minutes secretary...
BR: And also made tea!
Social Life
Q: What social events were organised besides the business
meetings?
MB: Well, they had dances, we had groups playing...
CB: Drinking sprees...
MB: Even in Guy's...
JTC: You look at "The Spur" and you'll see adverts for days in
the Waverley, the paddle-steamer. It cost about 2/6 for the whole
day. We did a lot of these things. Then you had fighting things
too... Other socialist groups, the cycling club...
MB: The Clarion Club, that did a marvellous job, but the
Communists bust that up. The Clarion rooms were up in Wellington
St. You didn't have to be in a group at all; they had tea rooms,
all these things...
JTC: Snooker...
MB: That's right and social evenings, which all helped to defray
expenses. The Clarion Club covered a long period. And they had
camping facilities out in Carbeth. The CP went in and started to
run it too. By the time they were done, there was no group.
JTC: But also the deterioration in social standards helped. The
Clarion had a place in Queens Crescent, that was their club, but
in no time the billiard balls were pinched the tablecloths were
ripped - all sorts of things which never happened before the war.
Things were sabotaged, graffiti on the lavatory walls; that never
happened before the war.
MB: Even during the war.
JTC: A general deterioration of social standards which happened
at the end of the war, because the war broke down inhibitions.
Young fellows of 18 or 19 were smashing windows in Germany and
pinching things, they carried that back with them. They didn't
break them down in a revolutionary sense, where you did things
because you were an anarchist or because you were showing you
were opposed to authority, you did it for sheer irresponsibility.
All the framework of society had been shattered and that's how it
started and it helped destroy the Clarion.
MB: They didn't have a watch committee as such. But it was
yours, so everyone looked after it. It was a workers' thing..
Parents could let very young children go cycling with them,
because the strongest waited for the weaker... there was none of
this out-to-win. In the rooms it was the same, you just saw that
the rooms were looked after.
JTC: They also had caravans pulled by horses from village to
village...
Q: Were the socialist sunday schools connected to the Clarion
Clubs?
MB: No. I was taken very young to the APCF, I knew about the
rooms in Clarenden St, and also about Bakunin House. Tom Anderson
ran a Socialist Sunday School. They met..
JTC: They met in Methven St in Govan but there may have been
other places...
MB: Originally in Bakunin House, merely a let. That was my
first visit, I was 5 or 6 at the time. They moved away then, and
it was too far for us to travel from the north of Glasgow. The
College Sunday School was predominantly ILP, not because the ILP
ran it. There was a bond between even-pink revolutionaries at
that time, that you gathered together. We went to the College
Socialist Sunday School. It started down at College St and went
from that. Again, it burst up - there's no socialist Sunday
School.
Q: What do you think caused the lull in anarchism after the
Second World War? And what do you think of the upsurge in
militant anarchism?
CB: There's always been a continuation of splits. Anarchist
movements have drifted away and disappeared, but there's always
another crops up again. Right from the beginning of the anarchist
movement, as Caldy described. There will always be an anarchist
movement in Britain now. We've got to try to assess just what
happened to those movements which disappeared. They didn't die a
natural death. That's what I was trying to get at tonight. As
long as we allow people to dominate within groups there will be
splits. And if we are anarchists, we shouldn't allow them,
because that's one of the principles of anarchism.
JTC: I must have been at thousands of group meetings and always
a personality appears, and when it comes to voting, they want to
see how he's going to vote, and you get the votes swung by a
person who has the power of speech rather than by pure logic.
CB: I can recognise that Raeside was a great speaker and can
hold an audience for hours; I can recognise that Guy was a great
speaker, but I never looked up to them, never treated them as
personalities, though they had charisma or anything like that. If
I did, I'd know I was suffering from an inferiority complex. No
anarchist should suffer from something like that.
[Tape ends here]
Transcribed in November 1993 from a not-always-clear cassette
tape.
Audio copies can be obtained by contacting Scottish Anarchist
Part 1 of this interview is contained in issue 1 of Scottish
Anarchist.